


we were based on an end

by benshaws



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Ballet, Multi, Physical Disability
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-21 00:45:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/893826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benshaws/pseuds/benshaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire had been the lead of the ABC theater's newest ballet production - until he finds himself wheelchair bound from a car accident. Everything else goes downhill from there.</p><p>  <i>Enjolras was flying where Grantaire should be, who sat nursing his clipped wings from the sidelines of the studio, feeling distinctly as though he had been away on a very long holiday, and opened the door to his apartment to find someone had moved in in his absence, and was wearing his clothes, and his aftershave, and his fucking legs. Yet it felt something like falling in love again.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to my beta [Priya](http://stormhornets.tumblr.com/) and my Enjolras, [Paige](http://anglosaxonmonk.tumblr.com/), who, without, this fic would be an incoherent mess and would have stopped being written a long time ago.
> 
> Disclaimer: I know hardly anything about ballet or being paralyzed from the waist down, so most of that information has been gained from Google and Wikipedia. All knowledge of the UK mental health system comes from my family's own dealings with said system. This fic is set in the UK purely for easiness on my part. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

“You can turn back whenever you want,” Marianne tells him for the fourth time since they entered the building. Grantaire barely controls the urge to roll his eyes, and instead, keeps them fixed on the cold, flat surface of the floor as some sort of distraction. 

“I know,” Grantaire responds, for the fourth time, while Valjean gives him too-kind pity eyes Grantaire is trying not to deck him for and leads his mother down the labyrinth of corridors. The whole experience feels even more humiliating because she’s never visited the studios before, even after Grantaire’s five years with the company. Just another elephant in the room Grantaire has been trying to ignore since they had smuggled him through the back entrance. 

“If it gets too much-“ She begins again, which only makes Grantaire curl his hands into fists rather than making him feel reassured. Luckily, however, Valjean speaks before Grantaire says something like, “Why are you here, Marianne?” or “Why the fuck can’t you just leave me alone like you did for the last twenty years?” or even “ _I’m not dad._ ”

Valjean smiles, places a hand on her shoulder and tells her. “I’m sure Grantaire will tell us if things become too overwhelming.” Which is definitely some sort of joke, because things had become “too overwhelming” exactly ten minutes ago, the moment he had set eyes on the Friends of The ABC training studios. Not that Grantaire was going to tell them about that. His therapist had made an effort to tell him he didn’t have to be afraid of appearing weak for anybody, but it was ridiculously hard not to act overtly strong when people were back to treating you like a child. Worse, when people began treating you like a charity case. 

“Right,” Grantaire affirms, because his mother is staring down at him as if she was waiting for some sort of response. For added confirmation, he flashes her a smile, tight, with too many teeth, then returns to staring at the floor. That manages to keep her quiet, if only for a while.

As they move closer to the dance studio Grantaire can tell someone has left the studio door open because music is spilling out into the corridor. Most likely it was Courfeyrac. It was usually Courfeyrac. Then they would almost always have the fun of throwing jibes at his sorry face after Javert would appear and start on a long rant about the reasons why studios were sound proofed, and why doors should stay shut. Something which usually had either Jehan or Bahorel breaking out into a rendition of I Write Sins Not Tragedies.

 _Oh god_ , Grantaire thinks, quiet and small. _I can’t do this._

Unfortunately, Courfeyrac appears around the corner, beaming a smile, and stops him before Grantaire can vomit, or escape, or do both together.

“R!” He shouts at him, shoving both his fists and the air, and then he’s off.

He streams down the corridor toward him, like a puppy left home alone all day, and Grantaire goes to run at him, to meet him halfway, to tackle him, to bear hug the shit out him, and then he remembers the chair. He’s left watching him, awkwardly, and waiting for Courfeyrac to bridge the gap between them as his mother holds on to the back of the wheelchair and Grantaire grips savagely at the arm rests.

The hug is worse, but Courfeyrac doesn’t even hesitate trying to gather Grantaire up, even if he slams his thigh into one of his arm rests, and they’re both at the wrong height, and Grantaire almost ends up headbutting him, and Grantaire can see Courfeyrac’s legs bumping his own and he can’t _feel_ any of it. Yet Courfeyrac is laughing, face pressed into Grantaire’s curls in a way which is achingly familiar and warm, and Grantaire just grips him tighter.

Resurfacing from the hug Courfeyrac shoves his hair back from his face and grins at Grantaire. “I’ve missed you,” Courfeyrac tells him, hand flopping down onto Grantaire’s shoulder, and the other tapping against Grantaire’s forehead in a fist. Grantaire tries not to look too fond, mainly because he can feel his mother watching them as if this was some kind of spectator sport. 

“Really?” Grantaire shrugs, offhandedly, muffling a smile in the purse of his lips. “I didn’t miss you at all.” 

On cue Courfeyrac looks mock offended, going as far as pressing a hand to his chest in feigned shock. “Well then,” Courf announces, in a dramatised fashion. “This friendship is terminated.” He proceeds off with a huff, and stomps around Grantaire’s chair to hold a hand out to his mother.

“Courfeyrac, Ma'am,” He says to her as he shakes her hand. “Your son’s former friend.”

Grantaire can just imagine his mother’s pinched expression at that. However, her voice is kind enough when she replies with a simple, “Marianne.”

“Marianne,” Courfeyrac repeats, and then proceeds to make loud shooing noises behind him that must startle her enough to let go of his chair, because Courf is suddenly at the helm. “I am kidnapping your son for no longer being my friend.”

They stay just long enough for Courfeyrac to salute Valjean and call him “Sir,”, at which Valjean smiles, and continues looking pitiful, and a bit blase, before Grantaire is being haphazardly driven down toward their studio. 

-

They had been dressed in reds.

Grantaire remembers it in the way one remembers their own birthday, or their regrets, or the name of their father — it had become ingrained, a tattoo or a scar or a burn mark or a baptism.

They had been dressed in reds and they had been flying. At least that was what he had thought, just a bright eyed kid, and what he had voiced to his Aunt, in a tiny awed voice, without tearing his eyes away for a second.

“How do they do it?” He had asked.

“Do what, sweetie?” She had returned.

“How do they fly?” He had breathed, and sighed, and gripped the railing in front of their seats.

And she had laughed at him, foreshadowing a trend that would follow him for the rest of his life when Grantaire told people that he had been haplessly, hopelessly in love with ballet ever since. 

Enjolras was flying where Grantaire should be, who sat nursing his clipped wings from the sidelines of the studio, feeling distinctly as though he had been away on a very long holiday, and opened the door to his apartment to find someone had moved in in his absence, and was wearing his clothes, and his aftershave, and his fucking legs. Yet it felt something like falling in love again.

Grantaire can trace every one of his steps as Enjolras whirls, and bends, and breathes, and moves, yet they didn’t look like his anymore. Where Grantaire had been fluid, pure emotion and sloppier footwork, Enjolras is a cold, particular passion. He turns with absolute precision and hits every count Combeferre is making from the sidelines with a wild, strung up sort of passion, like he is screaming from his bones. It is intense and breathtaking, and the only reason why no one has noticed Grantaire’s entrance yet. Every pair of eyes are trained on him, magnetised.

It hurt.

Grantaire grabs for Courfeyrac half way between Combeferre’s next count of four, and tears at his arm with the resemblance to the caged in animal that Grantaire feels like. He tries, desperately, to keep breathing, but something sharp and large feels like it’s stopping him, jammed right through his jugular, and he wheezes like when he was seven and had asthma. When he strains for words they fail him, Courfeyrac, however, is one step ahead.

“You need to go?” Courfeyrac asks, and Grantaire nods, and Combeferre’s count stops, and Jehan’s voice cuts off in its sentence to call, “R!” from across the room.

Yet when he looks up all he sees is Enjolras, who stares at him with a indefinite sort of look as he wipes at his neck and shoulders with a towel. Grantaire twists his fingers into the material of Courfeyrac’s sleeve harder, a move that will probably leave his shirt disfigured, but Grantaire honestly cannot give a shit.

When Jehan appears in front of him he’s smiling, but it drops almost the instant he sees Grantaire’s expression. “Oh,” Is all he says, softly, and takes Grantaire’s other hand, and makes Grantaire cry, desperate and ashamed. Vaguely, he can hear his friends approaching, but the sounds of his name are underwater or beyond glass, and he only wishes he were that unreachable. Instead, he’s presented, a sobbing cripple, to all the people he’s known the longest, and the closest, and to his replacement.

Courfeyrac wheels him out into the corridor, and straight back into his mother and Valjean, who must have been waiting for him.

“Baby,” she says, and all Grantaire can see is the blurry filter of his tears, but he knows well enough that she’s moving over to him.

He lets go of Jehan’s hand first, then Courfeyrac’s sleeve, and snarls, “Fuck off, Marianne.” straight into his mother’s face, regardless that the door of the studio is still flung open at his back.

Courfeyrac, in battle mode, just grabs his chair and wheels them away from his now sobbing mother, and a worried looking Valjean.

For the entire journey he keeps his hands pressed over his eyes, a coffin. Beside him Jehan hums quiet sounds, and rubs his hand across Grantaire’s shoulders as best as he can while they’re in motion.

They wind up in the cool down room, that was soon not occupied, compliments of a glaring Jean Provuaire and equally glaring Courfeyrac. 

“Do you want me to-“ Courfeyrac begins after wheeling Grantaire beside the sofa. Minutely, Grantaire shakes his head and then spends an agonising few minutes stubbornly transferring himself to the couch. He slips, twice, and both Courfeyrac’s and Jean’s breaths catch each time but he eventually manages the transition.

Courfeyrac curls himself up against one side of Grantaire, and wraps an arm around his waist, while Jehan curls up against the other, and reclaims his hand gently. He feels exhausted. His emotions are playing Jenga somewhere inside his bones, and Grantaire can never be quite sure about when he is going to topple, only that any pull at the innocent looking blocks of anger, or resentment, or hurt, or regret, or jealousy, or ambition would take everything crashing down. With a sigh Grantaire leans into Courfeyrac’s embrace, and tangles Jehan’s fingers with his own, and squeezes his eyes shut.

\- 

They get twenty minutes of Courfeyrac babbling nonsense about Hannibal, and the new Star Trek movie, and how Man of Steel looks _fucking awesome_ and they should definitely go see it, while Jehan tries to braid Grantaire’s hair and throws in the occasional comment, until Grantaire isn’t a trembling mess and might just be smiling a little, and then they get interrupted.

“I swear to fucking God, Grantaire, if you don’t open the door this fucking second I am making Bahorel and Gueulemer knock it down instead-“ Eponine informs them, shouting from behind the glass, only to get interrupted.

“No, she won’t,” comes the droll tone of Javert, but that doesn’t stop her for a second.

“Yes, I fucking well will, and you know it, so you better get this door open now or-“ Grantaire erupts with a sudden laugh as Jehan, who had untangled himself from where he had been plastered to Grantaire’s side as soon as she had started speaking, opens the door and a wild Eponine appears.

She stares at the choreographer for a pause, then sidesteps him neatly to point a finger at Grantaire. “You do not have your mental breakdowns when I’m not there, alright? And then you _do not_ go and run off and leave me to hear about it from Bossuet, okay?” Eponine says, in a voice that can only be described as the human equivalent of a snarl.

From beyond the other side of the door he hears a soft protest of, “Hey!” which just makes Grantaire laugh harder, in a way that is probably unhealthy and probably making him sound like a maniac because he’s also _choking_.

She softens at him considerably after a breath, and then quickly stalks the length of the room to jump on his lap.

“Ow,” Grantaire objects, instinctually. He gets a narrow look for it, her elbow digging into his ribs.

“You don’t have any feeling in your lower body,” Eponine says, bluntly, as though she has to _remind_ him. “Do not pretend that hurt.”

From anyone else it might seem like an insult, and Grantaire would fucking take it as one, but from Eponine it wasn’t any of those things. It was Eponine reminding Grantaire who she was, and who she had been, in his kitchen drinking his beers after another one of Grantaire’s “pretty boys” had walked all over Grantaire’s heart, and setting him in her front room after he was kicked out of his apartment, and showing him the bruises she’d collected, courtesies of her mother, and letting him cry into her jumper when he’d screwed up an audition. Eponine was truth, and cold mornings on rooftops smoking cigarettes and lazily trading dance moves, and fingertips pressing fingerprints into the dust of his family photos, mocking his hair cuts and his socio-economic background.

Grantaire grins at her, yet can’t quite take the bitter edge off the statement. She swipes at the corner of his mouth with the edge of her thumb in concern. “Aren’t I allowed some perks of being a cripple?” He asks her.

Eponine just looks at him, “Yeah, you’re allowed better parking, you asshole. Guess who I’m riding with now.” she smirks, with a triumphant clap of her hands, while Grantaire glowers at her.

“Only if you want to ride with Marianne too,” Grantaire notifies her, watching as her expression goes sour.

“Never mind,” she quips, with a grin, slapping Grantaire’s cheek and sliding off of him. Behind her, Combeferre, who Grantaire hadn’t even realised was in the room, offers him a straight expression.

“Thank you for interrupting our session,” Combeferre say, dryly, then breaks out into a grin, stepping forward to slap Grantaire on the forearm. Grantaire grabs at the inner of Combeferre’s wrist before he can get away from him, and directs him with a look.

Combeferre had been the first one to meet him in the hospital, before even his mother had found out he’d almost died and remembered she had a son. Through those deep, dark parts Grantaire tries hard not to remember, and at almost every visitor session after that, Combeferre had been there. The world had been so very monotone then and Combeferre a slither of colour for Grantaire to hold onto, even as his mother brought with her more black, black, black.

“No problem,” Grantaire replies, and Combeferre’s smile is a quiet message of understanding Grantaire feels grateful for.

“Alright guys,” Eponine says from where she’s peering out at the door. “He’s stopped his tantrum, so you can come in.”

He flips a V behind her back, at which she says, “I can see that.”

The Friends of the ABC swarm in, and fill the room with noise, and laughter, and leotards. Thankfully, the only blonde he sees again that day is Jehan.

Later, he meets his mother in the lobby, whose makeup has been retouched to it’s usual perfection. “Do you want to take me home?” is all he asks her, and she just nods and opens the doors for him on their way toward the exit. Courfeyrac waves them off, with Jehan at his hip, in plumes of smoke from their cigarettes, the tendrils extended between the hands resting limp at their sides, like a caress.

-

“Courfeyrac seems nice,” his mother says, tentatively, as Grantaire rolls himself into the clean cut lines of his mother’s fashionable and over-expensive kitchen.

It smells so freshly of bleach and everything manages to shine so bright, like an after-shot on a Cillit Bang advert, that it makes Grantaire ache for his shitty apartment kitchenette, with it’s worn away sun-stained linoleum, ominous stains, and broken cabinets. His mother’s kitchen looks like it has never once seen beers spilled by friends, or vomit in the sink, or the slam of cabinets in late midweek arguments, or strangely re-arranged refrigerator magnets, or after party dwellers washing up, shoving foam into one another’s mouths, and eyes and faces, leaving wet handprints on the backs of shirts and jeans. There are no pictures on the fridge, only a straight lined calendar with neatly etched reminders. It looks lonely but Grantaire doesn’t care at all.

He laughs, harshly, heading straight for the refrigerator. “We haven’t slept together if that’s what you’re implying,” Grantaire tells her, bluntly, grasping for a beer.

When he turns around she looks offended, he’s glad. “I wasn’t-“ Marianne begins, leaving Grantaire gritting his teeth.

“You were and you are,” He clips out while hunting for a bottle opener.

From the side of the room he hears her taking a breath. “I’m just trying to take an interest-“

Grantaire’s laughing before she gets to finish, slamming the cutlery drawer shut, and turning back to look at her. “Well, don’t,” He instructs her, fingers slip sliding over the bottle. “You do not get the privilege to take any fucking interest in who I am, or what I do, or who I was.”

“I’m your mother,” Marianne informs him, steely.

“No,” Grantaire responds, slowly. “You are only the woman who gave birth to me, the mothering just about stopped there.”

She stares at him, her long dark hair, Grantaire’s inheritance, falling over her shoulders and her lip between her teeth. After she leaves Grantaire slams his fists into the granite work surface until they’re raw and humming.

-

He meets Mrs Davis in the alcohol aisle, while Grantaire is trying to decide between two moderately priced brands of whiskey with a contemplative expression, and an internal loathing. Like an old friend she puts a hand on his shoulder and looks at him, very somberly and very seriously. It’s amazing the people you bump into after you get paralysed from the waist down. Old neighbours? Yep, they're among that new group of sudden well wishers.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she tells him and Grantaire looks up at her from where he has a bottle in each hand.

“Yeah, me too,” he reports, wishing he could wheel himself away from this situation. Grantaire would only end up rolling over her feet, however, which would likely only prolong any interaction.

“How did it happen?”

“Oh,” Grantaire says very seriously, lowering one bottle back onto the shelf, and then the other. “You see, I was shot.”

Grantaire can’t even pretend he isn’t getting some sick sort of pleasure from watching her eyes go wide, and her mouth slack. She stares at him, blatantly, until she regains some sort of composure.

“What? I heard you were-“

Grantaire’s thoughts avalanche into a bitter quarry, because what Grantaire hates more than people asking him casual questions about how his life was ruined, as though he is a newspaper on every London subway to pick up and read, is people asking him casual questions about how he became a paralysed twenty-something year old when they already knew the answers. He stops her before she says something stupid like in a car crash or in a road accident and smiles, blithely.

“Yeah, well,” He lowers his voice, and she lowers with it, shuffling forward to hear. “I’m under the witness protection programme, and, obviously,” Grantaire emphasises the word a little too violently, but manages through. “They wouldn’t want me to talk about it.”

She keeps him there for quarter of an hour, and only leaves because her husband rings her. Not once does she notice Grantaire’s increasingly rickety, quivering hands, or how he misses every fourth or fifth breath trying to breathe. When she leaves he makes a shop assistant find him the cheapest, dirtiest bottle of vodka she can, and buys three bottles.

-

For a while, Grantaire and Eponine never acknowledged one another’s existence. At the time she had joined the theatre, Grantaire had been so wrapped up in the performance they had been prepping for that unless you were a studio floor, or a dancer part of the production, Grantaire couldn’t give you the time of day.

It had been a particularly bad day when he met Eponine. Courfeyrac had injured himself in practice, and Grantaire had left the studio while Joly assessed the extent of the damage when he ran into Eponine and a now unemployed ex-dancer.

She had been so thin, with sunken in cheekbones and joints that seemed to jut out from her skin, her hair in a wild bun, full of split ends, and a tatty shirt pulled over her leotard. All Grantaire had heard was the guy call her “A cheap cunt,” when he took a swing at him. Grantaire had knocked him out, and then got a fistful of knuckles from Eponine herself.

“I can fucking look after myself, alright?” She had told him, then laughed, grabbed at his elbow, and invited him out for a beer. Grantaire spent the next week dealing with angry make up artists who had to disguise his black eye.

“Wait, who are you rooting for?” Eponine asks, in the middle of an episode of Total Wipeout on a sickening Saturday evening, while passing Grantaire a bottle of vodka. He takes a clean, straight swig and then blinks at the television.

“The hot English one,” Grantaire informs her. She stacks herself up against his side in a woozy, easy gesture, pinching the edge of their shared blanket between her fingers and stealing inches.

“He is _fine_ ,” She sighs, although her eyes are shut, and her face turned into Grantaire’s shoulder.

Grantaire’s company is crammed between all-day rehearsals and picking up Gavroche from Judo practice, and as he watches her, claimed by the tender draggings of sleep, he wants to ask why she’s here. Grantaire is sour and insolent. He hears himself snapping at little things in between bouts of normal conversation, and the muscles in his shoulders ache from tensing them too often, like hackles on the rise. He wants to know how anyone can stand him like this, and why she isn’t out at the Musain where the company is kinder, and the laughter isn’t forced through people’s teeth. Instead, he drinks, she dreams.

When he lies down to sleep in the downstairs study-converted-bedroom with his eyes stuck open, he finds sometime in her stay she found a moment to write on the whitewashed bedside cabinet “CALL ME IF YOU NEED TO,” signed with a brash “E”. Sleep baits him, somewhere between 3:35am and 4:04am, with the words imprinted on the backs of his eyelids.

He dreams of dancing in blood, and slipping.

-

“It's pub quiz night,” Courfeyrac informs him, as Grantaire wheels himself into Marianne’s living room and proceeds to stare at Courfeyrac, Jehan and Bahorel who are dispersed in various corners. Jehan has a fur-full of his mother’s cat, while Bahorel is examining the bottom of what Grantaire guesses is a very expensive vase, and Courfeyrac is lounged out on the sofa. At Grantaire’s enterance Courf sits up and stares at him, disarmingly serious. “It’s pub quiz night and you are rejoining the team,” Courfeyrac reiterates.

“No,” Grantaire says, simply, and a little spitefully. Grantaire had been at his therapist’s practice only thirty something minutes ago and his eyes felt like they were clogged full of grit, and his head felt like he’d had been hit in the temple by a brick. He also couldn’t turn up at his therapist’s stinking of alcohol, or there would be talk about things like an interview with the mental health team, or being sectioned, so Grantaire was painfully, vividly sober.

Courfeyrac whines and flings himself sideways into some cushions to hold his arms out at Grantaire. “We need the _team_ ,” He tells Grantaire, with conviction. “We are a _unit_.”

“Combeferre is beating him,” Bahorel explains, putting the vase down and absently cracking the joints in his hands.

The Combeferre/Courfeyrac war had started after a game of drunken Trivial Pursuit in Fueilly’s attic apartment, and had involved Combeferre winning, and Courfeyrac narrowly losing and Courfeyrac announcing he would one day “exact his revenge”. A week later Courfeyrac had, somehow, talked the owners of Cafe Musain, a bar they haunted after training sessions, into hosting a pub quiz. Somehow, everyone else had got roped into the warfare along the way, with Jehan, Bahorel and Grantaire on Courfeyrac’s team and Feuilly, Bossuet and Joly on Combeferre’s. Eponine had copped out of the whole affair by stating she was Switzerland, and also that she wouldn’t be able to make it half the time, anyway, because, as she put it, had “that little shit head Gavroche to look after”.

“Beating _us_!” Courfeyrac all but wails, and Bahorel purposely rolls his eyes at Grantaire, who smiles, a little distant, in response.

“Should I take pity?” Grantaire asks Bahorel, witheringly.

“Yes?” Courfeyrac says.

“Nah,” Bahorel grins over Courfeyrac’s words. “I think you should let him stew.”

Grantaire looks at Courfeyrac and shrugs a shoulder, noncommittally. “Bahorel says I should let you stew,” He informs him, childishly, and Jehan muffles a giggle in the corner where he’s making the cat swipe for his fingers.

“Whyyyyy, Bahorel,” Courfeyrac moans in a victimised manner. “I trusted you.”

Jehan laughs harder while Bahorel, looking smug and unconcerned, picks up another vase.

“But, I guess I could,” Grantaire sighs, and knows he’ll regret this as soon as Courfeyrac’s punching the air and bounding over to him on his toes to collapse into his chair for a hug.

That’s how Marianne finds them - Grantaire with his face squished into Courfeyrac’s chest, who is mumbling things about vengeance and “due revenge” above him, Bahorel looking like he is about to steal something, and Jehan in a pink-knit sweater now covered in dark, moulting fur, and a very fond cat.

It’s sometime after this, with Jehan perched on his lap picking cat fur off his clothes while Grantaire directs them how to use the chair capacities in his car, that Grantaire realises his mother had entered the house at the same time as Grantaire himself.

Worryingly, when Grantaire asks, “How the fuck did you get in?” Courfeyrac and Jehan just look sheepishly toward Bahorel who grins, and taps his nose, and returns to fiddling with the controls.

Grantaire decides he doesn’t want to know.

-

“Where’s Joly?” Grantaire asks, staring over at Combeferre’s table, where Enjolras is jammed between Combeferre and Feuilly, talking animatedly with his hands. Grantaire watches, from a distinctly bitter distance, as Combeferre nods, very seriously but with a smile, at whatever comment Enjolras’ is making. When Enjolras appears to finish his point Combeferre drops some remark which literally has Enjolras’ throwing his head back with laughter, open and unguarded, exposing the length of his throat, and his Adam’s apple, bobbing like a buoy. Twenty minutes ago, as the car was winding through the darkening city streets, Grantaire had distantly processed the variables which could lead him to another embarrassing tête-à-tête with emotional breakdown. He’d taken into account someone saying the wrong word, or seeing a Landrover, but he hadn’t spared one thought for Enjolras.

Enjolras, just by association, turns Cafe Musain, after years of safety and security, into a dim prison cell and a lifetime sentence. Enjolras, who must have sat in the seats Grantaire used to, and pissed in the Cafe toilet, and drunk from the same glasses - beautiful, perfect, glowing Enjolras who had stolen his friends and taken his place, was now also Grantaire’s judge, jury and jailer.

“Where’s Joly?” he repeats, with a little more desperation, making Bahorel turn and look at him curiously.

“He’s on hand at the performance tonight,” Bahorel shrugs, and his look becomes a little more pointed. “You know when Cosette’s in a performance Valjean brings in a whole fucking medical team, just incase.”

Internally, Grantaire berates himself for being so stupid, not just for not checking who would be at the pub tonight but for thinking for a goddamn second that anywhere is safe. Everywhere had become a reminder of the dead meat below his waist, everything stabs like ghosts. On the surface, he smiles and nods. “Right. Get me something to drink, will you?”

Bahorel nods, “What do you want?”

Grantaire can’t even feel ashamed when he says, “Something to get me _pissed_.”

As Bahorel shrugs, and winds his way toward the bar, Courfeyrac shoots past him and barely misses crash-landing into Combeferre’s table.

“The team is back, and you are going _down_ ,” Courf grins, gleefully. He’s so loud that almost the whole bar hears him, tipping over a set of dominos that Grantaire did not want pushed.

Enjolras’ eyes snap to where Grantaire is positioned in the doorway, Jehan lingering behind him, and Combeferre, Feuilly and Bossuet's eyes trail after his shortly. Thankfully, Grantaire has a reason to ignore Enjolras’ sharp, trained look as the regulars drift up to greet him, slapping him on the shoulder, and mussing his hair, and loudly protesting his absence. When they begin asking questions, Jehan’s smile becomes sharp, and he makes blunt yet polite excuses for them, helping Grantaire manoeuvre between the seats, chairs and tables to their usual spot.

Eventually, Courf gets bored of trying to jibe Combeferre into a suitable reaction, who, of course, takes the whole ordeal in his stride with a bland, yet fond expression, and re-joins them, collapsing on top of Jehan’s lap until he gets pushed off. With a pout, Courf settles to sitting beside Jehan instead, lacing their fingers together beneath the table like shy teenagers, blushing and all.

Grantaire is slow clapping them for their subtlety when Bahorel returns with blessed, holy alcohol. After that, Grantaire slowly and surely gets pissed, and fights the urge to punch Enjolras in the face for his consistent, persistent looks he glues to Grantaire throughout the night. Grantaire offers up the answers to two questions in the entirety of the game, but when they win Courfeyrac announces, from on top of a stool, that he “was the key to their victory.”

-

Out in the cold of the pub car park, Grantaire feels a little more sober, even if the world is still swaying around him in a woozy slow dance and his eyes feel out of sync. He focuses on the blur of light omitted from Jehan’s cigarette, as he perches very carefully on Grantaire’s lap for a second time that night. Bahorel had decided to get a lift back with Bossuet, so they’re just waiting for Courfeyrac to finish gloating so they can drive back to Grantaire’s house, where Courfeyrac had left his car. Jehan’s fingers are very carefully on his face, ice cold against his cheekbone, and Grantaire sways into that too.

Grantaire feels sick, and tired, and impossibly angry but he just stares, despondently, at Jean’s cigarette and tries not to think too hard.

“I know why you stayed away,” Jehan tells him, quietly, breathing out smoke. “But I wished you hadn’t taken so long coming back.”

Grantaire grins at him, and it’s not the darkness that makes it look bitter. “You had my replacement to entertain you,” he slurs, morose and petulant and Jehan looks at him like Grantaire just broke his heart, and that just makes Grantaire feel guilty. By drunk-logic he places a hand on Jehan’s chest as though he can put it back together.

“Enjolras only replaced you in the ballet, R,” Jehan tells him, weighted. “You’re still ours.”

Grantaire looks at him, and then up at the sky, because Jean Prouvaire has a trend of making Grantaire cry recently. “I can’t ever dance again,” slips out, entirely on its own, muted and meagre, and dammit, if Grantaire hadn’t done enough crying today.

“I know, R,” Jehan tells him, and he must stub out his cigarette somewhere, because suddenly both his hands are on Grantaire’s face, braced against his jawline. His thumbs curve over his tears, sweeping them away. “And I'm sorry. I know what it means, I know.”

Grantaire’s hand sharply uncurls itself from Jehan’s shirt and shoves at his hands. He drops them, scalded, like a timid child. Yet, all Grantaire does is buries his face in the crook of Jehan’s neck instead, and Jehan half laughs, half sighs in relief.

“How do I just…” he tries, and breaks off, into an angry, primal sound, his fists thumping against Jehan’s sides. “Fuck- That was it, Jehan. Dance was _it_.” Grantaire doesn’t even know what that _means_ but Jehan knows. Jehan knows because Jehan had not grown up under the influence of a loving family, but of ballet, and tap, and ballroom, and modern, and jazz, and waltz, and street, and salsa. Jean Prouvaire knew the history of ballet fanatically, and was an eclectic blend of the classical, the neoclassical and the contemporary. He had studied Vaganova in Russia, Cecchetti in England, Balanchine in the US, and completed the RAD, yet he had, just as equally, been taught by street performers in back alleyways of grimy Manchester, and listened to the teachings of a 1st Grader as he would to a Premier Maître de ballet. He adored to dance but immersed himself in choreography, and when on the floor he was either always placid or volatile. Alone, he blended tap with ballet, and street with ballroom. Even though he had a job at one of the top up-coming dance companies in the UK, in his tender twenties at that, he looked incredulous at compliments and bashful at praise. You could leave him in a dance studio and return hours later to find him still in the same spot, drawing out dances with his eyes and scribbling in his notebook. Jehan embodied the heart and soul of dance, and he _understood_.

“I don’t know,” Jehan replies, stroking Grantaire’s hair. “But you’ll have us, whatever.”

Grantaire clings to Jehan like that for a while, making those embarrassing noises that come with crying, until the tears stop, like tears do, running their course and leaving you with heavy bones. He pulls back and then discovers Jehan is crying too, with a lot more finesse, and the choreographer just looks at him with red rimmed eyes and tears shining on his cheeks, then their laughs splinter into the cold night air, because it’s all shit and it’s not going to get better.

Grantaire pulls Jehan back, one last time, and presses their foreheads together. Softly, after a moment, Jehan murmurs, “I’ll miss dancing with you.” Grantaire nods, shaking, a hand on the back of Jehan’s neck.

“Me too,” he concedes, with a sad, reminiscent smile, thinking about them and Skinny Love in the December of 2011 barefoot and laughing in Grantaire’s kitchen. Bahorel had been passed out on his couch from drinking too much, while Bossuet played a tired game of Solitaire at his dining table, and Combeferre and Joly finished their argument about which dance style led to the most injury, which had been flittering back and forth between them like a shuttlecock in a lazy game of badminton on a humid and sleepy afternoon, to watch re-runs of Top Gear instead, volume turned low.

Gently, Jehan presses a kiss to Grantaire’s forehead then slides off his lap, landing on a floor with a bounce. He smiles at Grantaire warmly, and bounces on the pads of his feet again, rubbing at his arms. “I’m gonna go find Courf,” Jehan says, nodding back toward the Musain then wandering away into the dark, gravel crunching beneath his shoes.

Grantaire breathes, and scrubs his hands over his face then surveys the sky, then surveys the dark. It’s then he sees Enjolras across the gravel car park, sat on a bench with his knees tucked into his chest. Enjolras stares back at him in a way which makes his heart _squeeze_ , then he gets up, conceals his phone in his pocket, and walks back into the Musain, meeting Jehan dragging Courf behind him on their way out.

-

The term “post traumatic stress disorder” is thrown around at him, both by his mother and his therapist, until he feels like he’s trapped in a game of vindictive dodge ball. They throw other words at him too, like “depression” and “denial," so quick and so hard they’re plastering him with metaphorical bruises all over because, of course, he can’t move the chair quick enough to escape the onslaught.

Grantaire wakes up, sweating and twisted in the sheets, from a consecutive barrage of nightmares, filled with window screens, and an almost-dead body twitching on the pavement to his left, and blood. At one point Grantaire dances through the wreckage like the final act in Jehan’s choreographed performance, slicing the soles of his feet open and driving jagged shards of glass through his toes.

The clock tells him it’s 2:24am, and he curses at it in the dark, breathing hard and not crying. Grantaire sleeps like this, in snippets and slithers. At most he gets a few hours rest a time, before he’s hijacked awake by some shit fucked image his brain rustles up or by his barely functioning body clock. It feels exhausting in itself, a lather, rinse, repeat scenario.

Almost every night he winds up glaring at Eponine’s note, because if he took her word for it Grantaire would be stealing sleep from her every damned day. He debates the words again, in the not-quite-black dark and presses his fingers to her initial. Again, he shoves them away, at arms length, because Eponine has enough to do than cater to Grantaire’s apparent mental illness.

Instead, Grantaire drags himself out of the sheets and removes himself to the sofa.

His mother finds him like that somewhere after 3am, in the dark, lights gliding off his face, watching late night gambling shows just to hear the sound of a voice. She makes him tea, which she places carefully in front of him on the coffee table, and that he lets go cold, then perches, at a distance, on the opposite end of the sofa.

She leaves him sometime later (a trend), but before she goes she smooths a hand through Grantaire’s hair (he winces) and tells him to get some sleep (he doesn’t).

-

“The funeral’s soon,” Grantaire voices, quiet, over the Scrabble board to Eponine, who is now looking at him- No, looking through him, into his bones.

“So what?” Eponine asks, in a manner which is meant to be offhanded, but is instead stuffed full with barely repressed rage. Grantaire stares down at his letters in the hope of pretending he’s ok, but his heart is screaming for his attention in his chest, not crushed in a fist but between two heavy hardback volumes of “Traumatic Incident Reduction” and leaving him scraping hard earned breaths through his teeth.

Grantaire carefully lays out the word “DARE” on the board, tacked on the end of Eponine’s “CYCLE”. “His sister invited me,” He admonishes.

She stares at Grantaire, in a long, incredulous pause.

“That family took enough from you, Grantaire,” Eponine eventually tells him, muted and angry, while Grantaire rummages for three new letters. “Going would be stupid.”

“They didn’t _do_ anything,” Grantaire snaps out, on the defensive, even though he doesn’t know _why_. “That was all on him.”

“You’re defending them?” She asks, a mind reader.

Grantaire drags in a breath. “Just because one person in a family is a shithole does not make the rest of them by association,” He snarls, and she laughs in his face, flashing her teeth.

“Are we still talking about the funeral here?” Eponine says, deliberately spiteful, making him want to slam his fists into something. He doesn’t, just itches his fingers along the tiles in tiny, jerky movements, but the violence screams in the line of his shoulders, in his tensed, aching jaw.

“Yes,” Grantaire replies, frustrated. She watches him with dark, unconvinced, and furious eyes.

“So, you want to go?”

“No - I,”

Eponine cuts him off before he finishes, repetitive, “So, you want to go?”

Now he looks at her helplessly, angry and lost, and wishing he’d just kept his fucking mouth shut. “Maybe!” Grantaire tells her, throwing his hands in the air and accidentally scattering tiles between them. “Maybe I fucking do.”

Her laugh this time is a full bellow, suffocating between them, festering. “And you think you can handle that?” Eponine leers at him, with a malicious, drunken quality, like she’s been drinking something other than Marianne’s shitty expensive lemonade all afternoon. "He took your fucking legs, Grantaire!” She snarls, into the open space between them. “You’re never going to walk again, hell, dance again, he made you a fucking cripple and you just want to waltz into his funeral?”

“He _died_ ,” Grantaire throws back at her, hands in jitters, eyes glassy, Eponine a wobbling bitter snapshot. “I saw him die,” He breathes out in a hush, though his chest is heaving, exactly as his had, on the pavement before he was a statue and people swarmed out of their cars like lustful, eager flies.

She gets up and paces in front of him while he is trapped resting against the sofa, his legs laid out in front of him like a crime scene. “That’s the _point_ , R,” Eponine responds, each word spat sharply from her pretty mouth. “You saw him die and you’re thinking this isn’t really fucked up?”

Grantaire opens his mouth to deny it, swept up by instinct, by the fight, but he says nothing. He can’t. It is fucked up, and even that is over-simplifying it. It’s too broad, and painful, and bitter for him to grasp. Grantaire can’t tell what’s the right thing to do anymore, or how to untangle one painful emotion from another, but his sister had called him on the phone with a trembling voice and Grantaire couldn’t bring himself to hate her, he can’t bring himself to hate any of them, and he doesn’t know what that _means_. He thought about asking his therapist, once, but knew she’d only asking him what _he_ thought it meant and that was the whole fucking problem in the first place.

“Thank you,” Eponine brandishes, sarcastic and with an air of bitter grandeur, waving a hand down at him. “We agree on something.”

All Grantaire says is, “I want to go.”

“ _Why_?” She asks, equally exasperated and interrogative. For a moment she presses the heels of her hands against her eyes then crouches down in front of him, eyes locked on his face. “Give me a damned good reason.”

Grantaire hasn’t had a damned good reason for doing anything since a Landrover had ripped through his shitty tin can, and he had watched, like a slow motion action movie stunt, as the driver was ripped through the window screen, crumpling onto the pavement with a thud, like a rolling pin hitting meat, and Grantaire had distinctly thought he should be feeling pain, when instead, he couldn’t feel his toes.

He thinks, probably for too long. “I don’t want his family to live with the guilt that their son paralysed someone,” Grantaire admits, quietly, straightening the tiles on the tiny green Scrabble stand with the tip of his finger. “I want them to see I’m doing a-okay,” Grantaire shrugs, scraping a smile in her direction.

Eponine takes a pause before she hits him, hard, on the shoulder, huffing. “One day you’re going to give me an aneurism,” she tells him, getting up and flopping back to her place on the other side of the Scrabble board.

“So you’ll come with me?”

She throws tiles at him, brows furrowed. “Yes,” Eponine sighs. “Yes, for god’s sake, you dummy.”

-

Grantaire smokes cigarettes and pretends his hands aren’t shaking, chair tucked below the back fire exit of the Friends of the ABC studios. His mother left him an hour ago to discuss shit with Valjean and the theatre board, instructing him to “go and talk to his friends”, while she left to deal with Valjean being too nice and oblivious to notice the board trying to grapple for as much of Marianne’s money as they can.

Grantaire’s shaking because he barely slept last night, and woke up in sweat soaked sheets, and only just made it to the toilet in time to vomit up the meagre contents of his stomach. He’s also shaking because he’s drunk enough that he reeks of alcohol and because anxiety is clawing at the innards of his stomach, a neglected and wild animal, making him feral in the eyes and skittish in his hands.

He’d fled to the back of the building fifty minutes ago, meeting Combeferre on the way, who had given him one long, stifling look then walked by saying, “I never saw you.” Something Grantaire was shakily, brokenly thankful for.

It is not the sort of day Grantaire wants to see Enjolras walking toward him, in a pair of dark grey sweatpants and a loose fitting red tank, obviously having just finished a rehearsal, but with his hair a tussled image of perfection, and his eyes blown wide with post-dance endorphins, and Grantaire’s name settled on his lips.

Grantaire shrinks back into his chair when called, and scrambles further back as Enjolras approaches, as if hoping he could sink through the chair, and through the wall, and away. A kind, angelic part of Grantaire wants to shoo Enjolras, to tell him to place as much distance between them as humanly possible, before Grantaire turns snide and cruel and starts lashing out at things, so Enjolras might have a chance to get away. As it turns out, the sadistic, terrified part of him prevails and he keeps his mouth shut.

If this were anyone else, Jehan, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, his mother even, their reaction would be a slightly altered repeat performance of Combeferre, yet Enjolras doesn’t know him any better. Hell - he may perceive this as being Grantaire’s norm.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras repeats as he gets closer. It makes Grantaire want to snap and tell him _you don’t get to use that name_ but he can’t, he can’t because Grantaire secretly harbours a coward in his bones, who sleeps inside his stomach. Instead, Grantaire is hot, furious silence, staring at Enjolras and keeping his mouth firmly shut. Thus, Grantaire witnesses the exact moment Enjolras’ warm, easy smile cools from liquid metal to hard, mangled steel you could install in an art museum.

“Do you have a problem with me?” Enjolras’ voice aims at him, loud, hard, sharp.

 _Yes, yes, yes,_ Grantaire wants to scream. “Yes,” Grantaire replies, grinning in a way that feels like it takes up too much of his face, pressing his cheeks up toward his eyes.

“Hating me isn’t going to bring your legs back,” Enjolras notifies him, bluntly, and the words rip through him like Landrovers’ going over the speed limit at the hands of drunk drivers. He thinks, _no_ , a quiet, distant plea, _you’re not allowed_.

Grantaire is a laughing earthquake of grief, scattering ash from his cigarette. Enjolras is a helicopter one thousand feet up.

“Fuck you,” is all Grantaire manages, ripped out of him dumbly. Usually he’d be spurting witty, cruel comebacks, but the process abandons him, leaving him with nothing, feeling nothing, being nothing.

“You don’t deny it?”

Grantaire wants to deny it. The thing he would love the most is to tell Enjolras “Yes”, straight in his smug fucking face, but he can’t because he’s right. So, he laughs, dragging cancerous smoke into his lungs.

“No,” he says, then looks up into Enjolras face and only laughs harder.

“Are you getting off on this?” Grantaire leers, leaning forward in his seat. “Is this the sort of perverse shit that gets you _hot_?”

Enjolras looks back at him, repulsed, in the way one looks at a rutting animal or dried vomit. “I was looking forward to meeting you,” he tells Grantaire, voice slipping to a little wistful place, as if Grantaire had dashed some concealed hopes of Enjolras’ on the ground. Grantaire wonders, snidely, and only briefly, what those hopes of Enjolras’ were. Did he expect Grantaire to be kind? Did he hope for a positive man, who had come out from recovery raring to take what life he had left? Grantaire had always been a pessimistic, charmless bastard. Dance had just repressed that side of Grantaire for a long, long time.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Enjolras lips turn at that, a holier-than-thou grimace, and even _that_ doesn’t make him look ugly. Enjolras is still the image of perfection, a dancing wondrous Apollo every body seems to adore. It just makes Grantaire hate him more, vehemently.

“I didn’t feel the need to dignify it with an answer.”

“You didn’t feel the need,” Grantaire echoes back, incredulous, wild. “What _are_ you?”

Enjolras ignores that too, and continues on with his previous train of thought as though they hadn’t just deterred from it. “Everyone spoke so highly of you,” Enjolras informs him, voice a shade of quiet. “I expected more.”

Laughter bubbles up from Grantaire’s gut yet again, and escapes him in fragmented, broken intervals. “Wings?” Grantaire questions him. “An extra arm? A third eye?”

That makes Enjolras sneer, a full-bodied, vintage sneer, brewed for twenty-five years in a dank, dark cellar, and he folds his arms tightly over his chest, and stares Grantaire down. “They told me you were brilliant,” Enjolras reveals, but the words are clipped out, run short of patience. Grantaire flashes him a grin.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Grantaire coos, stubbing out his cigarette on the arm of his chair and pressing a hand over his heart. “Have I disappointed you? I do, do try my hardest to meet your expectations, sweetheart, I wouldn’t want to fall short of the mark.”

This time, Enjolras’ gaze is a cocktail of disdain, loathing and pity. Grantaire thinks, _good_. He wants Enjolras to hate him- No, more than that, he wants Enjolras to feel _guilty_.

“You are despicable,” Enjolras announces, with a finality that makes Grantaire’s grin slip into more of a smile, conceding defeat.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Enjolras lingers there for a few moments longer, seeming torn between continuing the conversation and leaving. He chooses the latter. The further he moves away the more Grantaire feels something tugging, sharply inside of him, as if someone’s fingers were curled around his rib cage. When he is gone, Grantaire presses his hands against his face, digs his fingers into his eyes, and screams.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thanks to my beta [Priya](http://stormhornets.tumblr.com/) and my general cheerleader [Paige](http://anglosaxonmonk.tumblr.com/) as always.

“I think something’s died in there,” Courfeyrac reports, returning with an armful of boxes and a pinched expression.

Bahorel, beside him, mirrors the look. “For real, it’s fucking disgusting.”

Grantaire flashes them both a grin which probably isn’t sheepish enough, because Courfeyrac glowers at him. “No one has been in there for weeks?” he shrugs. “Not since the accident.”

Grantaire looks up at his apartment, feeling wistful. He’d spent the better part of four years in that apartment. It was a shit hole, broken and cramped, but compared to some of the places Grantaire had lived in before it was a palace in his eyes. The only problem was the elevator, at its best, worked about twenty percent of the time which meant returning back to his little cozy hole of crap hadn’t been possible. Instead, he’d been installed in Marianne’s house ever since. She had offered to go and clean out his apartment herself, but nothing about that sat well with Grantaire, so he’d refused.

“Ugh, well, it’s gross,” Courfeyrac informs him, shoving a box in the boot of Bahorel’s car and then promptly throwing himself over Jehan. With a laugh Jehan panders to his boyfriend’s whining, and gently cups his face in his hands and trails slow kisses over his cheekbones. Peering up through his hair, Courfeyrac looks at him.

“I don’t know why you’re laughing, you haven’t been in there yet.”

“I bet he’ll still whine less than you,” Bahorel smirks, shoving his own box inside the car and dusting his hands off. Courfeyrac, the epitome of maturity and seriousness, shoves his tongue out at Bahorel, but rolls off Jehan to let him stand.

Smiling, Jehan stands and brushes off his jeans then falls in step with Bahorel as they head back inside. Beside Grantaire, Courfeyrac leans back on his hands and watches Jehan go, warm and appreciative. When Courfeyrac finally graces Grantaire with his attention Grantaire is grinning, gleefully, at him. With a huff Courfeyrac lazily swoops out an arm, shoving his hand against the wheel of the chair, which just makes Grantaire grin harder.

“You’re sickening,” Grantaire informs him, not unkindly.

“I love him,” Courfeyrac replies after a pause, simply, with a shrug. Yet, his shoulders curve in a little, and his face turns down toward the floor, and Grantaire is almost one hundred percent sure that Courfeyrac is blushing.

“Good,” Grantaire hums, smirking now more than anything. “I’d have to kick your butt if you didn’t. Well, roll over you, anyway.”

Courfeyrac laughs at that, and sits up to curl his arms around his knees, eyes still trained on the apartment building. Abruptly, after a few moments of silence stretching comfortably between them, Courfeyrac spins around to look at Grantaire, gaze steady and serious.

“Enjolras said he met you the other day,” Courfeyrac tells him, making Grantaire’s easy, happy thoughts about his love besotted friends turn from fond to sour. Red to black. His smile turns with it, pulling down into a grimace. “I get why you might not like him but he’s a decent guy, really, if you gave him a chance I’m sure you’d get along.”

Grantaire scoffs at that and rolls his eyes up to the heavens, thinking about Enjolras’ face when he had last seen him and the word despicable being tossed his way, Enjolras’ final judgement.

“You all really like him, don’t you?” Grantaire grates out, bitter. Courfeyrac’s look doesn’t even falter at Grantaire’s blatant jealousy, and remains on him, still warm, still weighted, like an anchor. He shrugs.

“Everyone we’ve ever introduced you to you’ve liked too,” Courfeyrac reminds him with a smile. Making Grantaire remember Courfeyrac and Bossuet producing a Marius one day at the Musain, or Jehan one day gesturing to a big hulk of a guy and telling them “This is Bahorel”, or even, Bahorel dragging Feuilly along to practice.

He thinks about them all but can’t correlate Enjolras to any of them. 

As Jehan and Bahorel reappear from the apartments Courfeyrac’s eyes drift back toward them, throwing a wave and a smile in their direction. “Something to think about,” Courfeyrac suggests, a little distantly. Quickly, Courfeyrac darts him another smile and then stands, leaving Grantaire to stare after him, forlorn.

Bahorel, who looks particularly pleased, shakes his box in mid-air and when he gets close enough, shouts, “We found your porn!”

Grantaire, who had slipped into silence, groans.

-

For the longest time, Grantaire wanted to hate Cosette.

While Valjean was the founder of the Friends of the ABC studio, it was not until much later that his adopted daughter actually joined the company. She had, in fact, spent a few years away in Paris, studying ballet, before returning to the UK. By that point Eponine and Grantaire had been close, and the former had been besotted by one Marius Pontmercy. Who of course was not nearly good enough for her (although Grantaire was biased) and who was so oblivious to Eponine’s advances Grantaire had developed the theory that he had literally grown up living under a rock.

When Cosette had arrived, however, Eponine’s unrequited love had been worsened by the fact that Marius had fallen head over heels in love with Cosette, and swooned around the studios like the lovesick fool he was. For Eponine’s sake, Grantaire had wanted to loathe her, but, truth be told, not only was Marius a long lost cause but Cosette was kind and wholehearted. Grantaire couldn’t help but warm to the honey blonde of her hair, and he liked her easy pore-seeping kindness that reminded him of Courfeyrac, inherent and natural, and her dreamy naivety, and the soft colours of her dresses, and how she always carried food on her, apples, mints, chewing gum, no matter what the occasion. Both Eponine and Grantaire soon realised they couldn’t loathe her, and although Eponine suffered with the bittersweet wounds of her affections, eventually she conceded that if Marius was happy, she would be too.

Cosette was also a brilliant dancer, which meant it wasn’t long until she had bagged a lead role (with Marius) at a Friends performance.

-

Grantaire and his mother get invited to one of these shows by Valjean (the board were still after Marianne’s money) and though watching them on the stage makes him feel a little bitter, happiness wins out from seeing Marius and Cosette after so long.

Afterward, they ease their way through the crowds to backstage. There are some whispers, some too-trained eyes through the journey, that makes Grantaire’s skin crawl. He forgets how many people he actually knows until he’s at a local performance, dancers, designers, makeup artists, loyal fans. All of them watch him with pity, sometimes fascination, it’s a shitty look to replace what had once been adoration, admiration. Grantaire tries his best not to make eye contact with anyone, and when people do have the nerve to come over he lets his mother speak for him, instead, pretending the accident had left him mute as well.

Backstage is a mess, as always. Dancers mill about, changing, and laughing, some of them removing their make up, others stretching out their limbs. Eventually they catch Marius in the crowd, who’s still dressed in his leotard, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. He’s already grinning like an excitable puppy, but somehow, when he sees Grantaire the grin just gets wider, brighter, all encompassing.

Marius Pontmercy is a person with one of those rare qualities of making the smallest thing exciting. At birthdays even the lamest presents had him grinning and practically bobbing with excitement and thanks. He is equally the sort of person to get distracted by someone walking a dog or strolling with a cute baby, and after petting the dog, or cooing at the baby, he would then be an unbearable ball of happiness for the rest of the day. Quite frankly, it was why most of the Friends had wanted to hit Marius when he had first met Cosette, for having to put up with that sickening happiness multiplied tenfold. Another problem with this quality is that it had a dangerous flip side of a deep dark depression. Luckily, that had mainly been Courfeyrac’s problem when they were still flat sharing together and Marius had been having Cosette issues.

That excited quality is one Grantaire can almost feel over the other side of the room. It lights Marius up, from head to toe, and he comes bounding across the room with a Hollywood skip to his step. Occasionally, at moments like this, Grantaire can sort of see why Eponine had liked Marius and why Courfeyrac dotes on him so much.

“R!” Marius calls when he gets closer, and then leans forward to give Grantaire a very awkward but well-intentioned hug. “It’s good to see you!”

Grantaire wishes his friend’s happiness wasn’t so particularly catchable, however, because Grantaire quite likes wallowing in his own shit, but at Marius’ expression, he can’t help but smile back at him.

“You look great,” Marius tells him, enthusiastically, and if it were anyone else Grantaire wouldn’t believe they believed that. Grantaire’s hands are trembling a little because he hasn’t had a drink in hours, and there are dark circles beneath his eyes, and well- He's in a fucking wheelchair. This, however, is Marius.

Grantaire just sighs, and rolls his eyes. “Take me to your girlfriend,” is all he says.

When they find Cosette a while later she gives him an equally tight hug, takes one look at him and says, “You look like shit.”

This is why he likes Cosette better.

-

He borrows a suit from Combeferre, that’s just big enough to be slightly uncomfortable, and fiddles with his tie, sleeves and cufflinks the entire drive to the funeral. Unsurprisingly, the night before was terrible. Grantaire had spent it twisted in dreams about car crashes, and blood, and dead bodies, trying to scream awake but remaining trapped in the confines of his barely sleeping mind. Eventually, he had given up on sleep entirely, and smoked cigarettes out on the back porch and watched the sun come up, likely freezing his balls off (not like it mattered if he did).

The name of the driver had been Peter. He had been twenty-two and drunk when he slammed his car over the forty mile an hour speed limit and collided with Grantaire’s rust bucket at a junction. Most of the car came straight through the driver’s door, and into Grantaire. He had been stuck in the mess of metal for hours, and it was only pure luck that they hadn’t had to perform surgery then and there, to cut his legs off to untangle him from the wreckage. Instead, he got his legs, but they were useless to him forever. Traitors.

Grantaire had been told, many times, that he was lucky to survive at all, yet he wasn’t particularly sure it was for the best. Not only had he lost his legs, and dance, glorious, beautiful dance, but beneath his clothes he was an equal mess of scars and skin grafting. When he looked at himself in the mirror (which was rare) all Grantaire could think was how could someone ever love this? He had been contorted into a monster, with the personality to match.

“You know,” Eponine says, passing Grantaire his flask on the way to the funeral. “Normal paraplegics don’t keep in contact with the paralyser’s family.”

Holding up the flask in a gesture of ‘cheers’, Grantaire just shrugs a shoulder and asks, “When have I ever been normal?”

The words are enough to bring Eponine out in a smile, albeit a careful one. “Touche, my friend,” She replies, watching Grantaire chug back the unconfirmed liquid. “Touche.”

They meet Peter’s sister on the edge of the yellow gravelled car park, a tiny congregation in a flurry of black. Her name is Becca, and Grantaire thinks she would be pretty beneath the tears, and consequently, the running makeup, but he can’t be sure - doesn't matter anyway. The urge to chat up anybody had pretty much died back in that bleach stinking hospital ward he’d been trapped in for weeks, at the point where he found out he was a cripple for the rest of his life.

He tries on a smile for her, but it’s as badly fitting as Combeferre’s suit, so Grantaire lets Eponine deal out the introductions instead. Grantaire’s half expecting her to say something like “Hi, I’m Eponine, and this is Grantaire, the person your brother paralysed” but instead it’s all very English and cordial, with brief handshakes, smiles walking on ice. At least it gives him some sense of familiarity to cling to in this shit storm of a situation.

Becca’s leading them down the winding pathway when she innocently asks, “So, I heard you were a dancer?”

It is innocent, that’s the thing. Just a means to start a conversation. Nevertheless, just bringing the topic up gives him the jitters, especially here, now, in this situation. In a few minutes they’ll be at the funeral of the man who made the ‘hear’ a ‘heard’, that ‘are’ a ‘were’. Grantaire will be sombrely remembered of the face he saw, bloody, on the pavement near by, while sitting among Peter Owen’s closest friends and relatives. Worse than that, Becca is actually looking at him with interest, with some sort of polite hope, maybe, as if Grantaire had somehow broken the laws of a broken body and was by some means still continuing his career. It’s enough to make him wonder why the fuck he is here, enough to leave him wondering why he thought this was a good idea in the first place. Moreover, why Eponine ever agreed to let him out of the fucking house.

Grantaire feels the world skew to one side, the now familiar sickness churning in his stomach, the even more familiar, _fuck, don’t be fucking sick_ , repeated like a mantra in the back of his skull. Yet, even sick and bitter one word of Becca’s question catches him in particular, enough to make him speak before Eponine intervenes his quiet system malfunction. 

“From who?” He queries, stilted.

“Oh,” Becca replies, quietly. “Your mother-“ And of course, of fucking course, who else? “We talked, briefly, on the phone when I checked if you were still coming.”

“And that was what she mentioned?”

Behind him, Eponine squeezes his shoulder, not as a comfort but as a warning. Grantaire wishes he cared more, but right now he feels angry, violated all over again by his last remaining parental unit. At every turn Marianne is there, making his life more difficult. Like Enjolras, like Peter Owen, like the Les Amis, she is a ghastly reminder of who Grantaire had been. Unlike the rest, however, she reminded him of the Grantaire he was before dance had ever fully existed in Grantaire’s heart or life. She was square zero, conveniently returned after Grantaire was back to nothing. It wasn’t salt in a wound, it was a knife.

Vaguely, Grantaire realises he’s trembling. Meanwhile, Becca looks apologetic, and ridiculously kind, and Grantaire _doesn’t care_.

“I- Oh, I’m sorry, If I imposed, I-“

With a contrived grin and a wave of a hand Grantaire interrupts her, stating, “No, it’s fine. I am still a dancer.”

Mirrored, almost to perfection, Becca and Eponine swivel to look at him. Becca, on one side, looking bemused, upset, her eyes still red rimmed. Eponine, on the other, with her eyes narrowed, knowing he’s about to go too far, practically murderous.

“Synchronised wheelchair dancing,” Grantaire says, trying to sound offhanded, maybe as if he were making a joke. Of course, it’s not either those things. Rather, he stares at Becca, serious, mouth forming his words with spite. “Yeah, that’s a thing apparently. It's very popular. Shame I couldn’t have competed in 2012.”

Sharply, Eponine halts his talk, half a snarl, slapping him in the back of the head for good measure, “Don’t be a cunt, Grantaire.” Thankfully, it’s enough. The gesture clears his head sufficiently for Grantaire to see Becca in front of him, hand curled up in a tissue, eyes red, licked with fresh tears, and the uncomfortable way she holds herself in her dress. He feels sorry. He feels ashamed. Grantaire tells himself he’s trying, sometimes, as a cop out for the drinking, and the nightmares, and the getting up at four in the afternoon. Yet, he knows he’s really not. The Friends of the ABC, his friends, can put up with his bullshit, his cynicism, his darkness and depression. Becca just lost her brother, lost him with the knowledge he crippled someone. It’s enough to make even Grantaire’s dark heart want to behave, his bitterness, his anger, all those tight, tense emotions that are the murky colours of black, red, and green to mute to a shade of grey. Even if just for her, if just for this conversation, Grantaire can do that much.

“Sorry,” slips out by itself, wholehearted, making Becca look back at Grantaire. He recognises understanding in her features, at least enough to stop her from slapping him in the face. Enough, it seems, for her to accept the words. Uncurling his fingers from his chair, Grantaire rubs a hand down his face. “Defence mechanism,” He explains, voice raw, like an exposed wire.

“It’s okay,” Becca tells him, stopping a way away from the front entrance. A black parade slowly mills around outside, some stepping inside the large double doors, others catching hold of another person’s elbow, saying a few words. “I was out of line saying anything.”

A person waves over at them — her mother, perhaps? - and Becca waves back in acknowledgement. Grantaire thinks she is going to leave them, only she doesn’t, just drags in a breath and looks back at Grantaire, struggling for words. “I understand you might leave later,” Becca remarks slowly. “Which is fine. Leave whenever you want to, please. I just, we, just want you to know we’re so sorry about what Peter did to you. We - he, he drifted, for a while, ended up in bad places. We only got his body back. Do you - does that make sense?”

It doesn’t, not really. Yet Grantaire is sick of dragging up tragic backstories when he has enough of his own to deal with, so he nods, conceding, breathing (in, morning cigarettes; out, Jehan’s smile when someone performs his dances; in, summer evenings; out, the ABC’s laughter over two am bonfires; in, Eponine in Grantaire’s old sweaters, a foot in the snow; out, not Landrovers, not death, not Peter Owen, not hospital wards, not pain, not hurt). Becca nods, the circle time presentations over, and gently touches Grantaire on the shoulder.

“It was nice to meet you,” she states, then heads over to another figure dressed in black before Grantaire has any time to reply.

-

Grantaire makes it through some of the presentations and the pointless hymns, but then apparently Peter’s father wants to talk, and enough is enough, Eponine and Grantaire leave. They positioned themselves at the back of the hall incase something like this happened, but it doesn’t really help when it comes to the exit. The heavy door still bangs behind them, people still turn their heads, some whisper.

When he gets out into the cold mid-afternoon air his breathing is ragged, his head woozy. Like the convict he feels, Grantaire pushes the wheelchair away from the building, and heads out on to one of the pathways that head toward the plaques, the gravestones, the erect memorials. Dutifully, yet with an air of righteous judgement, Eponine follows him. He can feel her waiting for a breakdown somewhere behind him, making him move faster, gravel lurching beneath his wheels, spitting up from the ground, making things hurt more. Grantaire knows he’s waiting for it too, because things suddenly… break for Grantaire. One moment he is getting an apple from the fucking fruit bowl, the next he’s having a panic attack, digging his fingers into the kitchen counter. It was the same before the accident — his anger, his heart, his love, his smiles. The good and the bad, sudden and passionate, lurching and disorientating.

Eventually, when he feels less like he’s about to cry or throw his wheelchair in front of a moving vehicle (the irony) Grantaire stops at the headstone of a grave, and eyes it solemnly. He hears Eponine approach by the slow tread of her footsteps, even, paced, and it’s enough to solicit a calming effect. Far enough away from that fucking building, and the speeches, and the tears, Grantaire sags into his seat.

“I hate it,” Grantaire states, to the air, as Eponine wanders around him, plonking herself down on a patch of grass.

“Hate what?”

“The way people become heroes when they die,” he continues, light with remorse, while staring at nothing in particular.

“Not everyone,” Eponine shrugs, getting out Grantaire’s flask and taking a drink. Without hesitation, she passes him the bottle afterward. “Hitler didn’t.”

He laughs, drinking himself then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “No, but Hitler, and people like him, they get the other extreme,” Grantaire replies, eyes now on the metal flask, fingering the lid. “They never helped an old lady across the street, never, I don’t fucking know, played with their kids or told a joke, gave a present, whatever.”

“It’s just all bullshit,” He proceeds, barely stopping for a breath. “Some asshole bully of a kid dies somehow and suddenly he’s an A star student when he was getting Ds, some girl commits suicide, she’s suddenly loved. Funerals are crap, it’s all a big dream invented to make the living feel good about themselves. Or, not so guilty, at least.” Grantaire tacks on at the end, pushing a hand through his hair. “It would have been the same if I died.”

At that, Eponine interrupts. “Fuck off. You didn’t die, that’s the main thing.”

On a roll, however, Grantaire hears himself laugh - persists, anyway. “I would have been the talented dancer, cut short before his time. Set to go to all the biggest theatres, only to have the dream cruelly snatched away from him.” Snidely, he jibes, in faux quotation marks, “‘Hopefully he’s dancing in the stars.’”

“You’re being a cunt again,” Eponine cuts in, drily, watching him with enough disdain that he checks himself, sits back in his chair and breathes. “It’s not nice getting a phonecall saying your best friend has gone into emergency surgery and might not be back out.”

Grantaire swallows, rubbing an eye and reading the name of the grave in front of them. ABIGAIL HARRIS, dead just a little over forty years ago. Enough time for people to forget someone, for their friends and family to die, or move on entirely.

“Hearing you were alive was the best news I had that day,” she reiterates, expression adamant. Grantaire can’t help but smile at it, just slightly.

“What if I had been a vegetable? Would you have been so happy then?”

“Look,” Eponine breaks in, razor-edged. “What ifs are crap. Don’t pretend I don’t know. I was in love with Marius for two fucking years,” She cuts off to roll her eyes, elbows leant on her knees. “You move on, you find a reason to move on, you find a reason to live-“

“Like God?” Grantaire laughs, almost a snort. “A higher calling?”

“Do I look like I’ve accepted Jesus Christ into my life?” Eponine quips at him, gesturing down at herself, and her slightly ripped skirt, the dusting of bruises on her knuckles. “No, you find something worth living for. A person, a place, a thing, anything. It doesn’t matter, you just survive for it.”

“I did,” Grantaire returns, frustrated now. “I did, it was dance, Eponine.”

“There are other things,” She tells him, more quietly, gaze not sad, but with an old sort of sorrow. The sorrow you get from seeing too much too young. Grantaire has to look away, and ends up fiddling with his tie. "People. For me it’s Gavroche, the ABC -“ She pauses, stalling on a breath, “- Azelma.”

Now Grantaire is looking back at her, but she doesn’t cry, only remains, a steady pillar of seriousness.

“I want to be selfish, and tell you to get better, but I can’t,” Eponine says. “If you want to leave, if you want to find new friends, if you want to kill yourself, that’s your decision, not mine, not anybodies but yourself. But I miss you, Grantaire. Not whatever the fuck you’re doing to yourself at the moment. _You_ , and not you with the dance either, dance wasn’t you, it was just something you loved. So, I’m waiting it out, alright? Whatever you do.”

With that, she gets up, and walks back the way they came. This time it’s Grantaire who follows her.

-

Grantaire mopes around the house for a few days, and lets the stubble set in around his jaw because he doesn’t have an appointment with his therapist until Thursday, and fuck it, that’s why. After a while, however, Grantaire gets bored of watching reruns of Top Gear and Friends, tired of the silence. Marianne is on a business trip somewhere he didn’t bother to note down, so the house is cold and quiet. By day three he’s aching for a voice which isn’t recorded, a familiar face which isn’t televised, so he goes and visits the studios.

When Jehan sees him he breaks out into a smile.

“You look very gruff,” he tells him, from his seat on the studio floor, arm deep in floral wire and fake flowers. Out on the floor Combeferre has paused the group to critique Courfeyrac’s footwork before setting them back to work. Grantaire can feel Enjolras’ gaze rake over him from his seat on the studio floor. Grantaire looks at Jehan. “Very manly, very sexy.”

“Only for you, sweetie,” Grantaire drawls, earning him a grin. Quickly, Jehan gathers what he’s working on so he can take a seat on Grantaire’s lap. He ends up folded against him in a way which is becoming increasingly familiar, head resting back on Grantaire’s shoulder, a warm, comfortable anchor.

As Jehan leans forward to continue braiding the flowers onto the wire Grantaire gently props his chin up on his shoulder, observing his work.

“What are you working on, Chloris?” Grantaire asks, and feels Jehan’s laughter shake through him with the bump of their arms.

Turning his head a little, Jehan looks at him out of the corner of his eye, amused. “Greek?”

Grantaire shrugs a shoulder, “Goddess of flowers. Flora if you’d rather be Roman, they did make her more fun. She had a festival all about fucking and drinking and flowers.”

Dryly, Jehan replies, “Sounds like your type of gig.”

“You know it,” Grantaire grins, picking up one of the flowers in his hand, then twisting it between his fingers.

“Joly’s cousin is getting married,” Jehan informs him, fondly, batting Grantaire’s hand away and pinching the flower back.

“Which one?”

“Laurette,” Jehan hums, back to twisting flowers onto the wire. Briefly, he waves the piece of work at Grantaire. “She asked me if I could make flower crowns for her bridesmaids.”

Grantaire laughs, sudden and sharp, and Enjolras’ gaze startles to him like a pin prick. He presses the laughter into the warm curve of Jehan’s shoulder. “Is that the one that tried to make out with Combeferre?”

At his name Combeferre pauses in his talk to look at them, suspiciously, while Jehan shakes with muffled snickers. “The same,” He tells him, turning to look at Grantaire to share a grin. “Remember-“

Grantaire interrupts him, knowing where this is going, and nods. “Yup.”

Although many of the Friends of the ABC come from money, not many of them come from family. Grantaire has a dead father, and a mother who doesn’t give a shit, poor only because he chose to make his own way rather than suffocating in Marianne’s mansion. Jehan is an only child of parents who spend their lives on planes and on their cellphones, who merely occupy his childhood house, with its unneeded six bedrooms and private driveway. Eponine had been raised in abuse and squalor, only just escaping with Gavroche to a better life, even if her sister is still stolen from her. Feuilly’s parents are dead; Courfeyrac, Bossuet and Bahorel don’t like to talk about it, Marius has a grandfather who apparently hates his guts, Combeferre only sees his folks every Christmas and birthday, and Cosette solely has Valjean. Joly, however, Joly has family.

Joly has a bright eyed mother with Joly’s shade of brunette hair, who had once been a dancer but now ran a bakery. Joly has a loud, overzealous father who is both a chiropractor and a hypochondriac, and who has the habit of slapping people, too enthusiastically, on the back. Joly has a little sister named Jolie (his father’s doing), who Joly is charmingly over protective of. Joly has laughing, gossiping aunts and uncles, he has first cousins, and cousins twice removed, and second cousins, and batty great-aunts, and grumpy grandparents, and sick, withering great-grandparents. His family is huge, and loud, and dramatic, and somehow the Friends of the ABC had become adopted into the rabble.

This was mainly because it was always someone’s birthday (and when it wasn’t some excuse would be concocted for some sort of family gathering) which led to mass events — barbecues, swimming parties, bowling. Mostly, however, the former happened, and the Friends of the ABC got invited. Soon enough it was the norm to find yourself being flirted at by one of Joly’s aunts, or being tackled to the ground by the littlest cousins. The Friends of the ABC got drunk, danced, sang karaoke, danced some more, and borrowed Joly’s family, if only for one late warm evening between slightly burnt hotdogs and beef burgers.

The Laurette incident was a catalyst for a relationship waiting to happen for frustratingly long time. So long, in fact, most of them were relived the incident had happened before Courfeyrac had dreamt up some elaborate plan to get the two of them to acknowledge their “serious sexual tension”. Combeferre and Joly, equally, had been pining for one another for weeks. They were intellectual equals, both of whom had studied the physical side of ballet, although Combeferre had opted to become director, which suited his nature perfectly. They bickered over dance techniques, and talked about body ligaments while Joly examined a dancer, and generally flittered around one another, stupid and in love. Laurette had kissed Combeferre, drunk and awkward, and made Joly realise some things that had forced him spend the next hour in the bathroom crying, under the comfort of Musichetta and Bousset. After a week of awkwardness from the two of them they had finally, somehow, managed to start dating.

(Courfeyrac had made Joly’s mother bake Joly a “Congratulations on the sex” cake, and the both of them had giggled like schoolgirls over it for fucking weeks.)

Beneath him, Jehan deflates with a sigh, fond with memories. “Poor Joly,” He murmurs, Grantaire nodding in amused agreement before Jehan startles, pretty much jumping off of Grantaire’s lap. When Grantaire looks at him he has his phone in his hand.

“Something wrong?” Grantaire asks him, brows furrowed slightly at Jehan’s expression. With a shake of his head Jehan packs up the materials for the crowns into a bag, quickly diving in for a one armed hug.

“No,” he mumbles, smiling again. “I just forgot I had a meeting with Valjean today.”

Grantaire smirks, “At least it’s not Javert.”

“True,” Jehan says. “Don’t make yourself a stranger, alright?”

Grantaire rolls his eyes, and with some effort, achieves an indifferent smirk. “When have I ever?” He asks, innocently.

Jehan returns the eye roll, fondly. “Remember, I have a _lot_ of blackmail stories if you do.”

Levelling him with a look Grantaire smiles, “You wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I totally would.”

“Yeah, no, you’re right, you would,” Grantaire replies, causing Jehan to laugh again, as he shoulders his rucksack onto his back.

“See you soon?” he says, angling it as a question.

Grantaire nods, yielding as Jehan begins to retreat. “Sure.”

As Jehan makes his way over to Courfeyrac his smile slowly reappears, blooming, sudden, bright and lofty, when Courfeyrac’s hands slide over his waist. Jehan, in turn, slides his arms around Courfeyrac’s neck, fingers curling into the hair at the back of his neck.

Combeferre rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and, deadpan, says, “Thank you for interrupting, Jehan.”

Jehan throws him the middle finger in reply, then takes a luxuriously long time in kissing Courfeyrac on the mouth until Eponine breaks them up by punching Courfeyrac sharply on the shoulder.

Flushed mouthed and red cheeked Courfeyrac beams as Jehan slips away out the studio doors, waving to him before he disappears.

It aches only because Grantaire can’t imagine that dream now, of loving like that. Maybe Grantaire would fall in love, by accident, with some pretty blonde catastrophe, but as always, the thought of anyone loving him back is a no go. Even if they did, over the years the love would wear down. They would want sex, children, whatever. They would get tired of being a partial carer, the routines of folding and unfolding wheelchairs. Eventually he would become old, moving harder, and they’d hate him more. Maybe someone could accidentally love him for a week - a month - pretend they could ignore the difficulties of a paraplegic, but in the end they would tire. The relationship would fracture, arguments splinter between them more and more, until they would loathe one another. Leaving him either to pull out before things went too far, or for them to go, only because he loved too much, held on too tight.

Eponine gives him a despairing look, and repeats the sentiment Grantaire had given Courfeyrac days ago. “God, you’re sickening.”

“Just because you’re jealous that you don’t have your own beautiful, stunning, intelligent, highly talented choreographer for your boyfriend doesn’t mean you have to take it out on me,” Courfeyrac tells her, wistfully, high, earning him another sharp shove. When he stumbles he’s laughing.

“I have people who know how to hide dead bodies, Courfeyrac,” is Eponine’s only reply, pointing a finger at him.

Grantaire is cut off from listening to their exchange by a hand sharply catching a hold of his shoulder. Jumping, Grantaire lets out a muffled yelp and spins around, cricking his neck, to look at the culprit.

“Can we talk somewhere?” Enjolras asks, a demand concealed in a question.

Dragging in a breath, Grantaire throws back, pettily, “I don’t know. Can we?”

“Grantaire-“

“Look, whatever. Sure,” Grantaire interrupts, on a sigh, before Enjolras makes some remark in front of his friends. The last thing Grantaire needs is an argument with people around to witness Grantaire casually breaking down.

With the music back on, and the dancers back on their toes, it’s only Combeferre who seems to notice them go. His gaze, perceptive as always, follows them to the door.

-

“Do you love Jehan?” Enjolras asks, once inside an empty studio. Grantaire, taken by surprise, barks a laugh, which ricochets around the spacious room and fills in the gaping gaps in between them.

Enjolras is that furious, packed in rage Grantaire saw the first day he met him. It curls down the muscles in his shoulders, and in the stubborn set of his jaw, tensed up in the tight grip of his fists. Grantaire almost can’t bare to look, but he does, transfixed, an insect worshipping a fly catcher. He repeats the words again, quieter, less like a question and more like a threat, “Do you love him?”

He holds Enjolras’ stare, battles with it, and mimics him. “Do _you_ love him?”

That catches Enjolras off-guard, at least, and he reels back in cold, flinching shock. “No,” He replies, and Grantaire can tell that he doesn’t, but he pushes anyway, guarding his brick walled heart.

Grantaire had loved Jehan, once, years ago now. They’d fucked, one night, after too many beers on Jehan’s parent’s leather couch (now Jehan’s, inherited not from death but from distance). Sticking to the leather, slick with sweat, Grantaire’s hands on his hips, mouths like static. In the post-orgasm daze, glued to the black material of a dead cow, Jehan had lulled his head back against Grantaire’s chest and laughed.

“I hate this fucking couch,” he’d said, their fingers tangling, Grantaire’s nose pressed into his hair.

Grantaire had said something stupid, reckless, probably, and half an hour later they ended up wrecking the sofa they’d just fucked on in some spur of teenage rebellion. As if the knives, or the aerosol and lighter combo, or the angry ripping fingernails would somehow pay vengeance to their shitty upperclass backgrounds and uncaring families. After that, it just happened naturally. They fucked, bipolar. Often hot, hard, skin on skin, with the blushes of their bruises and the crisscrossing nail tracks overlapping like map lines. Sometimes softly, slow intakes of breaths into one each other’s mouths, a gasp pressed into a collarbone, legs caught up in the sheets. Fucking became dating, dating became a break up.

They had worked. In fact, they still worked. Yet, although he wants to imagine it, his life wasn’t such a journey of greatness and happiness before the accident. Instead, Grantaire had become entangled with Jehan at a particularly rough patch that all their friends knew about. When there were bills he couldn’t pay, and drug abuse, and the same old routine of getting bruises from bars instead of from teeth in the dark. Jehan, in turn, had helped drag him out from that place, with Eponine as a wingman. Grantaire had cleaned up his act for good after that, at least, until the crash happened. They’d ended on good terms, and their dysfunctionally close relationship had been classed as normal by all their friends since.

Someone, obviously hadn’t filled Enjolras in on that fact, and Grantaire is a little glad. If only because it was private, between them all, a shared understanding Enjolras obviously hadn’t been invited to. He didn’t have the right to understand.

“Then why would you ask?” Grantaire argues.

Enjolras has these cliche blue eyes which Grantaire could spin metaphors off of, but at that moment they’re the colour of ice, or the sky on a clear, bitter winter’s morning. “For Courfeyrac,” He replies, simply, causing Grantaire’s brain to falter slightly, a frown to appear.

“Do you love Courfeyrac?” Grantaire responds, eyebrow raised, incredulous. In turn, Enjolras makes a face and crosses his arm over his chest.

“No,” Enjolras repeats, adamant. “I just don’t want to see Courfeyrac hurt, or Jehan, for that matter.”

Something quietly and coldly dies in Grantaire’s chest as he stares at Enjolras’ face, unbelieving of any of it. Grantaire had always understood that Enjolras might befriend the members of the ABC, although he had never exactly accepted it. Yet, not this. Enjolras being protective isn’t something Grantaire had thought could happen in such a short space of time. This isn’t a casual reaction, but meant Enjolras is involved, close. That he cares. That in turn, his friends care, which he knew anyway - keeps getting told - but something like hope slips away from him, making his stomach feel empty. Grantaire doesn’t even feel the anxiety, just a deadness, as numb as the that certain point on his back where all feeling falls away.

“I don’t love him,” Grantaire finally states, almost in defeat, and with a sudden urge to go back Marianne’s to the quiet, to nurse a bottle of some hideous alcoholic substance there and to practice forgetting how to think.

“Don’t you?” Enjolras persists, eyes narrowed, pulling over a chair by the wall and sitting in front of him. “I saw you, in the car park.”

It takes a moment for Grantaire to recall what Enjolras is talking about, and when he does he laughs, earning him another sour look.

“That wasn’t exactly usual friendly behaviour,” Enjolras reiterates, as Grantaire laughter fades and he rolls his eyes, throwing his hands up in the air.

“Can’t you ask someone else about this?” Grantaire says, exasperated.

A part of him wants to explain the reasoning for why Jehan floats around him, always keeping contact, about anchors and shipwrecks, but it brings up those deep dark things Grantaire keeps tied down in his head. Thinking about it only starts a spiral downward, only heightened by his disability, only highlighting the fact he’s a cripple and a fuck up ten fold. So, he tries not to think at all, not without Jehan to squeeze his fingers until they ache, or Eponine to slap him on the head, or Combeferre’s level tone to bring him back to the surface. Instead, he avoids Enjolras’ gaze, afraid of becoming a bug trapped in amber, and tries to keep his eyes on some non-threatening, non-Enjolras surface until he can leave, bury his panic attacks and past and mental illness in easier means - a bottle.

“Why?” Enjolras finally says, head tilted, breaking the pause building between them. “What would they tell me?”

Grantaire shoves his hands against the wheels of his chair, pushing away from this conversation, away from Enjolras accusations and words and stares and brilliance, back toward the door. “They’d tell you to mind your own fucking business.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to god this fic won't always end on scenes with angry!Enjolras (really, I swear). Thank you for everyone's kind feedback and words and just generally being lovely ugh ebkjrnelkm;l. As always feel free to come and talk to me on [Tumblr](http://benshaws.tumblr.com/) or just tag a post 'benshaws' if you'd like me to see it!


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